[slickpoppa]

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Huh? With a top heavy payout wouldn't 3-4 times EV mean something less than 3-4 chance to win?

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The more top heavy the payout is, the better the correlation is between winning and EV. In a winner take all tournament, EV is 100% correlated with the probability of winning. As payout gets less topheavy and more evenly distributed, there is less of a correlation between EV and winning, and less of an advantage for pros, as you mentioned. But given that such a high percentage of the money in MTTs still goes to the top 3 finishers, the correlation between winning % and EV is very high.

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In politics betting there is a known field, and if Paul's numbers were artificially inflated, that would mean someone else's numbers are artificially deflated, and profit can be made.

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Thats incorrect. The prop bets that Borodog mentioned are not set so that the percentages must add up to 100%. So Ron Paul's odds going down do not make all the other candidates' odds go up. They actually set the lines so that the percentages add up to much more than 100%. They'll list 6 candidates at 2:1 if people are dumb enough to bet on those lines. Generally all the lines tend to be deflated. They usually never approach what the "real" line should be because people cannot bet on the other side. Like I said, if people could bet on Ron Paul losing laying 7:1, that line would be bet up like crazy. Competition between books doesn't really drive the lines up that much because the people dumb enough to bet on Ron Paul at 7:1 are not the people who will shop for lines.


Back to the original topic: I like Ron Paul, but the bottom line is that he's polling at 1-2% and his chances of winning the Republican nomination are somewhere close to that as well. He is certainly not underrepresented in the media compared to his popularity and chances of winning.